


Trade Language -- Or, an interlude about bodies and tongues.

by periphrasis



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Communication Failure, Language Barrier, M/M, Romance, Sexual Content, Sexual Inexperience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-13 23:57:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9147865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/periphrasis/pseuds/periphrasis
Summary: After the Cup of China, Victor and Yuuri attempt to redefine their relationship.  In English.  After months of waiting.  In some ways, actions speak louder than words. But more words would help.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece to Lingua Franca. That one was written first, but I'm not sure it really matters what order they're read in.

After the cameras, after everything, they were in an elevator in a hotel in Beijing, and Victor reached for Yuuri's hand.  But he didn't say anything, and so Yuuri didn't say anything, and so Victor didn't say anything, and so Yuuri didn't say anything.

This, one might say, was a pattern.

Victor hated every second of the distance imposed by having to get the key card out of his pocket, and considered, briefly, what would happen if he just pushed Yuuri up against the door.  It was a quiet hallway.  Maybe nobody would notice?

Still, it was good to have privacy, worth the temporary indignity.  Victor held the door open.  He felt gallant.  Yuuri went in, and he followed, starting to regret all the layers of clothing.  He would take off just enough to be seductive.   _ Take off everything and he just ignores you.  Perverse. _

"Do you want to kiss me again?"

There it was. Victor could have just done it, right then and there, but he had tried the bold moves.  The bold moves didn’t work.  You offer him everything and what do you get?  Nothing.  So, offer him nothing.  Almost nothing.  Just the smile.  "Again?"

"You kissed me, after I got off the ice."  

Yuuri was sitting up, and Victor settled in on the edge of the bed, not quite in his personal space.  This was just like any routine.  You learned what worked and what didn’t.  This was a jump you couldn’t land if you took it too aggressively.

Is he really pleased that it happened, or do you just think he sounds pleased?  How much time have you spent in Japan that wasn’t in ice rinks, before this year?

But Victor had to trust the program.  He’d spent all these months refining it.  Every failure.  Fall and get back up again.  Smile.  No, smile more.  If Yuuri was going to make him work for this, he was going to work for it.  Whatever imagined slight had required this obstacle course to make his way properly into the bed of a young man who’d spend a good part of an evening grinding on him less than a year prior?  Whatever it was he’d done, he was Victor Nikiforov, and he could handle it.

Smile more.  "Did I? I'm not sure that I did.  You know, it was all over the television, after, and somehow not a single clear picture in which I kissed you."

He’d looked.  On the TVs at the venue.  On his phone afterward.  One good picture.  He wanted one good picture.

"You kissed me," said Yuuri, more firmly now, "after I got off the ice."

The moment was fragile.  Bring it back, slowly.  He could be graceful about it.  "You told me you didn't want me to kiss you."

"I didn't, before."

Yuuri’s eyes were so earnest.  His face was so perfect.  Victor could still taste his chapstick.  How many more times could he do this?  How much longer could Yuuri expect him to endure it?

_ Fall.  Get up again.  Try again.   _ He used to fail.  When he was young.  He had been young.

There had to be something else.  Another right thing to say.  In the moment, the most important moment, Victor found himself without words.  A frightened thing in his heart whispered:  Who could possibly still want you after having spent this much time around you?  Victor Nikiforov, you are unbearable.  Yuuri deserves a poet, and here you can’t string a sentence together.

Yuuri was climbing into his lap.  Properly straddling it.  It nearly knocked the breath out of Victor, but he took advantage immediately.  He wanted simultaneously to have his hands on every inch of Yuuri and also to hold him fast so that he couldn’t somehow change his mind.

_ Any moment now, he’ll be on the other side of the room. _

"I want you to kiss me again."

Relief, so much relief.  It was the feeling of coming into the last of the program, of the realization that the worst of it was done, that all he needed to do was bring it home and it would be glorious.

Yuuri’s mouth was glorious.  He was fiddling with Victor’s shirt, but all Victor wanted just then was the press of Yuuri’s body against his and to kiss him all night.  Or he could tell that lie to himself, anyway.

“Stupid--stupid.  Sorry.”

Victor closed his hands over Yuuri’s hands.  “You’re rushing.”  Squeezed them.  They were shaking.  Astounding, the lack of confidence.  Don’t you know the power you have?  Victor didn’t ask the question.  He tried to find the answer in Yuuri’s face.  “We have all night.”

"We don't have all night.  We have to be to the airport by seven.  I haven't slept."  Yuuri didn’t look tired.  Not like earlier.  His back was straight.  There was tension in his thighs when Victor put his hands on them.  He wasn’t relaxed into that position.

“Would you prefer to go to bed?"

“We’re in bed.”

_ Where in the world can you relax, if not here?  _  Yuuri was starting to get the hang of the buttons.   _ Who could you want, if not me? _

A dangerous thought.  There, smile, treat it all like a joke.  “Do you want to sleep?”

“I want to sleep with you.”

Inside, the ice cracked.

Plenty of men had wanted that.  Plenty of women had wanted that.  Some of them had said so in far more elaborate ways, in several languages he understood and several more he didn’t.  The words had never mattered until they tumbled from Yuuri’s lips.

No one idolizes a hot mess, Victor.  He wants his hero.  Give him his hero.  Smile.

Victor smiled.

His reward for his composure was every article of clothing he got off of Yuuri’s body.  Yuuri, who could still dance while blind drunk.  Yuuri, who was completely sober and who still managed to swing his elbow around hard enough that the crack against Victor’s skull was audible in a room that previously had been mostly labored breathing and lusty noises.

No words for apologies.  The consolation was being able to get his hands on Yuuri’s bare chest, in the few moments before he was peeling off his own shirt.  He was still starry-eyed--was that how they put it--no, seeing stars--no, maybe both--when he pushed Yuuri down on the bed.  By then, he wasn’t worried about getting his pants off.  Just out of the way.

He’d seen it before, of course.  The two of them alone in the baths, pretending not to notice but holding fast to the memory.  All these months just to get this far, to stroke him and see the look on his face.

Just?  No, there was no point in stopping now.

If the look on Yuuri’s face for the touch of Victor’s hand was enthralling, then the sound he made when Victor used his tongue was exquisite.

Some things didn’t need to be translated.

Any other time in Victor’s life, that would have been enough, but there was a box of condoms in the suitcase.  Burning a hole in it, as the idiom went, except that they’d been smoldering there for months.  

Best to be prepared, he’d thought when he bought them.  

Because Yuuri definitely won’t be, he’d thought some weeks after that, as it finally sunk in that he’d choreographed Eros for a virgin.

It could still happen, he’d resorted to, later.

“Victor,” Yuuri said, stumbling over a few more words as Victor moved in to kiss him.

“Don’t worry.  I have everything.”  His hero.  If only it didn’t mean getting back out of bed.  Victor thought his knees were protesting the movement, but maybe it was only that he didn’t really want to put that much distance between them.  That could be it.  Just a twinge.

"You knew I'd want it?" 

He was too focused on finding where the bottle of lubricant had gone.  It wasn’t in the bag with his hair products.  Tucked into one of the thousand extra pockets in his suitcase, out of sight and out of mind.  "I thought you were going to want it ages ago."  Unfiltered.  An admission of fault, almost.  Victor had been wrong.

Looking back at the bed, Yuuri was sitting up, his face creased into worried lines, or maybe it was just that he was squinting without his glasses.  "I've never done it before."   
  
Victor succeeded in smothering his amusement long enough to get back to the bed, to draw Yuuri back down next to him, but kissing him, it bubbled up.  "I did figure that out.”

It had surprised him, though.  After the banquet.  Escaping without a word.  All that talk of pork cutlet bowls.  Weeks spent on the realization that this wasn’t just hazing, he wasn’t just trying to prove something to earn his way into Yuuri’s bed.

A hotel room bed, now.

“You have.  Done it.”

Victor had spent a lot of time in hotel room beds.  No shortage of opportunities, with all that travel.  No shortage of skaters, no shortage of their siblings, of fans, sometimes of other skaters’ coaches if he’d wanted.  He’d done less than he could have.  Much less.  But more than this.  He buried his face against Yuuri’s neck.  The details were unimportant. “Does it bother you?”  That was important.

“No.”  

Victor believed him, in the pause that followed, the single breath.  

"I want to murder everyone who ever looked at you that way."  Enunciated.  “Murder” contained no hard consonants and yet the precision on it could have drawn blood.  Yuuri’s hand was on Victor’s shoulder, and his fingertips dug in.

Victor’s heart trilled and he felt the stirring of another laugh that he wouldn’t have been able to explain, even to himself.  But it was right.  Lightness was right.  The moment of spinning weightlessness. "That would mean getting dressed."

"Fuck that."

There it was, free, the laugh, the landing, the flourish, the knowledge that all was right with the world and Victor was at its bright center.  “Fuck me.”

Had he expected a fade to black, then?  Wild applause and then scoring?

Sometimes, when he’d been younger, when the competitions had still been competitive, Victor had a certain dream.  Flawless skating, only to realize when the music failed to stop that this wasn’t the short program at all, and floundering into the second half.

There was a second half.

Yuuri seemed not to notice how much trouble he had getting the condom out of the wrapper. Though, to be fair, he had been interfering with that process.  Mainly by laying there, which was incredibly distracting.  They should have talked about it, but Victor found that he no longer trusted his voice, and nothing about Yuuri’s response suggested that he disapproved of Victor’s choices about their positions.  

Lifelong overachiever Victor Nikiforov settled for good enough, because it closed the gap between their bodies a matter of seconds faster.

“Don’t move,” said Yuuri, once he was there, and Victor stopped there, his hands on Yuuri’s chest, stayed there for what felt like centuries and might have been thirty seconds.  

It was all simultaneously too fast and excruciatingly slow.  A few moments later, give or take a thousand years, Victor looked at Yuuri’s face and saw on it a pleasure of which he had seen only a flicker, once, eons ago or the prior December, as Yuuri had pressed in against him.

He’d choreographed Eros for that face, and he drowned in it, his hand frantic to keep up.  He braced himself there, unable to catch his breath, only peripherally aware that Yuuri was following him until he seemed to be not just breathing hard but sobbing.

It was complete.

Finished.

Done.

Victor understood for a moment why the French called it death.

Then Yuuri laughed, and Victor’s heart began to beat again, and he remembered rather too late that the condom needed to come off, and that the world had resumed turning.

Everything was right.  Everything was as it was supposed to be.  Yuuri would keep getting medals, and Victor would keep getting this.  They laid together, bodies and limbs all caught up together.  Pork cutlet and egg, come together on their bed.

“When you win,” Victor murmured, “I get my katsudon.”  Yuuri made a pleased noise, made Victor feel clever for the metaphor.

They rearranged themselves under the sheets.  Victor, assured that he had finally won something that mattered again, slept like a champion.

The rush in the morning precluded doing it again, but the urgency had faded.  On the plane, at long last, Yuuri laced his fingers into Victor’s, and Victor laid his head against Yuuri’s shoulder and let his thoughts drift to summer.  

Too soon to be talking of weddings, but not too soon to daydream, was it?  Yuuri would understand.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the second thing I've published and I've found it much harder than the first, in part because I think my standards are now higher... in part because telling the same story a second time turns out to be harder than the first, to hit all the same moments going a completely different direction.


End file.
